The distinction that makes ai compression creepy is that it can use prior knowledge of what a face is.

Traditional compression has no high level knowledge of what a video call looks like, the algorithms are about patterns in how pixels change in time and space, so the artifacts from the algorithm are pixel-based effects (blockiness, blurriness, etc).

A neural net that has been trained on a million faces and is setup to draw a face may draw a perfectly clear image of a face on low bandwidth...but when it doesn't have bandwidth to be accurate, it doesn't blur things, it fills in details learned from looking at strangers who aren't on the call.